Ruth Marcus | An alarming pattern on government secrecy

2:21 AM,
Aug. 24, 2013

Written by

Ruth Marcus
The Washington Post

WASHINGTON - Footnote 14 should scare every American. Even the parts that aren't blacked out.

The footnote is contained in the just-declassified 2011 opinion by U.S. District Judge John Bates, then the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

In the ruling, Bates found that the government had been sweeping up emails before receiving court approval in 2008 and even after that was illegally collecting "tens of thousands of wholly domestic communications." ...